In 2022, Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled plans for Science Park and Research Campus (SPARC) Kips Bay, a state-of-the-art jobs and education hub in New York City. SPARC will transform Hunter College’s Brookdale Campus with an ambulatory care center, health care training simulation centers, an NYC Public Schools high school with health and science focus, and more. Driven by historic investment from the city and state, SPARC Kips Bay will make New York a global leader in creating and attracting accessible jobs in life sciences, health care, and public health by creating a pipeline from local public schools to careers in these growing and essential fields. New York City’s health care sector employs over 750,000 New Yorkers, and the metropolitan area’s life sciences sector is a rapidly growing industry with nearly 150,000 additional jobs in recent years. The city estimates the campus’s new commercial lab space will create about 2,000 quality jobs and attract new companies and startups, leading to additional good-paying jobs in the health care and life sciences fields.

 

During this walking tour, participants will have the opportunity to tour the Brookdale campus, visit a working laboratory, and learn more about the next stages of the SPARC project and how the city and state are working together to support the life sciences industry in New York City.

Conventional hospital buildings will soon be outmoded. While providing a wide range of services under one roof might have seemed efficient at one time, today we understand that very few patients require so much at once. Instead, a distributed system of care—with a bevy of access points and a focus on the patient experience—more efficiently addresses needs, both physical and financial. Today's health care providers understand this and are looking for ways to cost-effectively distribute the most care to the most people, while also enhancing the experience of workers, patients, and the communities that surround them. Simultaneously, developers and owners are looking for solutions for underused real estate of nearly every type, in both downtown and suburban locations, that can be scaled nationally. This panel will bring together top players from the entire health care real estate ecosystem to examine case studies of how a decentralized model can improve health outcomes while realizing the potential of vacant commercial real estate.